March 22, 2015
It is 20 years since
the sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway occurred. I cannot help reflecting on how
the fatalities, the bereaved families and the injured persons suffering from the
aftereffects would have spent their days if we hadn’t caused the incident. All
I can do is just to make my apologies to them and to contemplate the pain of my
crime.
Every time I see
and hear the news that wars and terrorist attacks in the name of God occurred
all over the world, many people were robbed of their irreplaceable lives in
them or have suffered from them, those news acutely grieve me overlapping with
my thoughts on the victims of my high crime.
Why do such
incidents occur in the name of God?
I simply outline
terrorist attacks based on religion from the perspective of the person who has committed
the high crime in the name of God, namely me.
Looking back on
those days, I got to leave judgment between right and wrong up to Asahara, the
founder of Aum Shinrikyo, regarded as the only person who knew God’s will by
blindly believing the just cause of saving people from the Armageddon (the
final war in the world based on eschatology) in accordance with God’s will which
Asahara set.
As a result, I gave
up a sense of responsibility for my own words and actions which I should have
had as a member of society naturally by following the teaching that we must not
think for ourselves after I became a priest at the age of 18, and I stayed
unchanged.
Asahara who had
his followers at his beck and call in the name of salvation completely lacked a
sense of responsibility for what resulted from his instructions to them as a
member of society.
As described above,
actually we all the followers of Asahara were not aware of the responsibility
for our own words and actions as a member of society and conceited ourselves to
be men of absolute justice which led to God beyond morality, and such our
irresponsible behaviors escalated into the high crimes.
“A lack of awareness of having committed a crime in the name of God” is probably
one of the essences of cult religion.
By delving into
this actual state in terms of the relationship between the founder and his
follower for God as transcendent existence, it is clarified that the practice
of the religious faith functions to deviate from the rules.
According to
Asahara, the founder of the cult religion, when practicing asceticism on the
beach in 1986, he was ordered to be “the Lord leading the navy and fighting” by
God, asked God “May I use the force as a means?” and received the revelation “take
the order” from God. It can be said that this revelation was the beginning of
all the incidents caused by Aum.
Afterwards, Asahara
began to preach on a theory of religious conflict and to justify himself by
saying that God delegated the right and the power to overstep the social rules
to him in his arrogance to distinguish the savers from the saved, the
unordinary from the ordinary. He blindly believed himself to be transcendent
existence like God, and by identifying himself with God that he imaged, he
replaced his ambitions with the orders from God and ordered us his followers to
achieve them.
We his followers blindly
believed Asahara to be transcendent existence as God and were mistaken in
thinking that we could be identified with God as transcendent existence and saved
by obeying him(it was buddhistically interpreted as attainment of enlightenment
in the group of Aum). I can say that in such a relationship between the founder
as God and his followers, we really assumed that the orders in the name of God were
given the power to overstep the social rules and obedience to them was absolute
justice of God beyond right and wrong in human society because God was
transcendent existence, and we obeyed the founder.
Is this the mechanism
common to terrorist attacks based on religion all over the world?
While I think that
there are various religions around the world and each of the religious persons
considers God whom he believes in to be right, I keenly realize from my
mistakes that we need to have a sense of humility to be aware that even if God
whom we believe in is an absolute being for us, it doesn’t necessarily mean
that our judgments or actions based on the belief in God are absolutely right
as well. It is because we human beings are different from God, cannot become
God no matter how firmly we believe in God, stay human beings permanently and sometimes
make mistakes. That is to say the group of Aum should never have justified its
own desires by replacing them with the orders from God.
Reviewing what I thought and carried out, I have
noticed that the loss of empathy with others, namely dehumanization started
exactly when I thirsted for the salvation and tried to identify myself with God
or the person worshiped as an absolute being. In the Aum incidents, we imposed
the salvation in which we believed on society at the sacrifice of many
irreplaceable lives. I feel full of remorse for having done such excessively sinful
and foolish acts.
As a person, I intend to face up to my crimes, be
aware of the responsibility for them, consider continuously what I can do and put
it into action one by one as long as my life lasts so that this kind of
incident can never occur again in the name of salvation.
Yoshihiro Inoue
